Multi-Platform Media Planning in Practice

In our previous blog post, Bringing Mobile into the Digital Media Planning Process, we examined how the shift in consumers’ digital consumption has created challenges in planning efficiently. Specifically, we delved into how planning in device silos rather than with de-duplicated audiences can lead to missed campaign objectives and wasted spend.

But just how sizeable can the impact be when planning on unduplicated audiences across platforms and entities? Let’s take a deeper look at this issue.

With entities anonymised so as to maintain neutrality amongst our publisher partners, let’s take four media entities – the desktop and mobile (web and app) audiences of Publisher A and Publisher B. They vary in volume of available impressions, but a single campaign would involve buying only a percentage of their total available inventory in any case (we’ll buy a fixed amount from each for this example). Let’s assume that you’ve already decided to buy both mobile and desktop inventory to reach your target audience in different mindsets, dayparts and locations.

First, the outcome of using just one of the individual publishers:

Publisher A offers slightly greater scale, but at a compromise of frequency within those reached, suggesting that site B’s desktop and mobile audiences are a little more in synergy.

Combining the two publishers could generate quite a dramatic shift in the outcome. Even greater frequency could be achieved by combining the mobile audience of Publisher B with the desktop audience of Publisher A – more frequency than either publisher in isolation:

Clearly these different combinations can have a sizeable impact in both the audience reached and the frequency amongst that audience. And this is evaluating just two publishers – naturally the majority of consideration sets are significantly larger.

Now imagine the scale of variables when introducing tablet as well as smartphone, and that’s before even beginning to refine plans by weighting impression counts on an entity-by-entity basis, and using the many other planning essentials such as effective reach, frequency capping, and of course, the actual CPMs for the inventory under consideration.

Fortunately, Comscore Reach/Frequency Multi-Platform enables customers to dynamically and painlessly experiment with all of this, including manipulating demographic targets, media properties, platforms, frequency caps and budgets to create and refine media plans, whatever the desired results. There are a total of 32 overlap potentials generated in real-time through the Reach/Frequency engine, which uses the best available underlying data sets and applies a de-duplication algorithm specifically suited to that campaign/entity/demographic, in order to deliver the most current results.

Interested in seeing Reach/Frequency Multi-Platform in action? Contact us to learn more.

This is the second in a series of blog posts focused on media planning for the Multi-Platform majority. These posts will examine the challenges in media planning in today’s fragmented device landscape and what steps planners can take to effectively optimise campaigns and budget in this new reality.